Legions of WTO opponents have descended on Hong Kong, possibly the world’s most free economy, to protest or advocate a myriad of conflicting causes. Simon, who’s office is just a stone’s throw away from the site of the WTO conference (unfortunate as protesters have been known to throw stones), is offering great summaries.:
What do the protesters stand for? It’s a diverse collection. There’s the migrant workers, the rural protectionists, the manufacturing protectionists, the anti-globalisers and the merely confused. In short, it’s a collection of all those who don’t understand economics and aren’t interested in eliminating their ignorance. For example, try this guy in a chicken suit:
British activist Tom Grundy was dressed as a chicken and held a sign that said, “WTO: more dangerous than chicken flu.” “We need to raise awareness of the true intention of the WTO,” he said. “It’s undemocratically elected. It undermines and overrides any law a country wants to bring to protect workers and the environment.”
“It’s undemocratically elected” - just like FIFA and the UN. Just to remind you, this is a meeting of the trade ministers from 149 countries. What’s to elect? Undermines and overrides laws? You bet - that’s what treaties do. This guy is an insult to chickens.
There is another irony. To some extent the protesters have valid points. World trade is unfair as it stands, with massive subsidies and market distortions making the world’s poor poorer for the sake of rich French framers’ vanity. Labour does get exploited. But the answer isn’t to destroy the one multilateral avenue for negotiating improvements in world trade. To compound the irony, many of these same anti-globalisation protesters are fiercly pro-UN. Apparently some kinds of globalisation are OK.
Also, a prime quote from Hemlock.:
Which of the wide variety of brainless causes does our scantily clad friend here espouse? Is she fighting for higher food prices for Korean families? Higher clothes prices for Europeans? Higher steel prices for Americans? Or is she fighting for foreign-owned factories in Southeast Asia to be shut down so the workers are thrown back into subsistence farming and have to pull their kids out of school?
Photo from .
